Obama Administration Acts to Clean Up Cars

Washington, DC - On Tuesday the Obama administration made official the agreement reached with car manufacturers last spring, to increase fuel economy standards and decrease global warming pollution nationwide.

President Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Highway Traffic Safety Agency to embark on a process for bringing the national fleet's average fuel economy to 35.5 miles per gallon by the model year 2016. The standards require a reduction in average CO2-equivalent emissions to 250 grams per mile by that same year.

The Sierra Club's Green Transportation Campaign called the move to decrease vehicle pollution "the biggest single step the U.S. can take to curb global warming and save oil."

This step from the federal government marks a victory for environmentalists in years-long fight for tighter fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. During the George W. BushGeorge W. Bush Administration, the state of California attempted to adopt its own standards to cut back on vehicle pollution more quickly than national standards mandated at the time. California was eventually joined by 14 other states wishing to adopt to the same tough standards, but the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied the states permission to create their own standards.

Despite the setback under Bush, California and its ally states triumphed in the end, to a greater degree than the imagined. The new Obama EPA has used the standards originally drawn up by California as a model for its own national standards, meaning pollution in all fifty states will now be subject to the same standards denied to California under Bush.

The Sierra Club predicts the new national standards for vehicles to reduce US global warming pollution by 950 million metric tons and save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in model years 2012-2016.